


Old-Fashioned

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alphonse Elric the Asexual Relationship Guru Strikes Again, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Established Relationship, Fluff, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28346037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Al has no intentions of letting his brother sabotage a really very lovely relationship just because Ed has the emotional acumen of an unsanded block of wood.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 41
Kudos: 668
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	Old-Fashioned

**Author's Note:**

> Finishing out [Roy/Ed Week](https://royedpalooza.tumblr.com) with the prompt "What a surprise"! Can you believe I wrote _multiple short things_?? My God. Even more impressive, even though this entire fic is about sex, there are _zero_ swear words! X'D Thanks for protecting our virgin ears, Al.
> 
> This is yet another "idk, like five years after BH and Ed still has automail and whatever" AU, because it is, and… yeah. :]
> 
> #teamButterscotch

Al is curled up cross-legged in their comfiest kitchen chair with a blanket around his shoulders, a cup of coffee in both hands, and a kitty draped lazily across his lap. There’s an open book on the table; Butterscotch is purring; the kitchen is warm from the way that he made toast in the oven just to heat it up. Ed isn’t awake yet to complain about inefficient toast-making methods or the fact that Butterscotch is a black cat, as if the color of her fur should matter more in her naming than the color of her soul. Al loves his brother more than life itself, which is _really_ saying something now that life is so unremittingly lovely, but some experiences are a bit more peaceful without him.

All in all, it is, Al thinks, the perfect winter morning.

The _thump_ noise that usually accompanies Ed attempting to extract himself from bed, getting his metal foot tangled in the sheets, and ending up colliding with the floor is Al’s only warning before the bedheaded wonder he would die for staggers into the hallway and then comes to join him in the kitchen.

The bags under Ed’s eyes are deep enough to put bodies in, and he’s already screwed his mouth up into a frown. He doesn’t even beeline to the coffee: he drops into the chair across from Al and folds his arms over his chest, automail underneath.

“Brother,” Al says, “you look awful! I heard you come in last night; I was up reading—did you just not _sleep_?” He leans in; Ed is angling his face towards the left, keeping one side of it further away from Al, and letting his bangs cast a shadow— “Is that a _black eye_?”

“Maybe it’s a butterscotch eye,” Ed mutters.

“ _Brother_!” Al says. He sets his coffee down, very carefully lifts Butterscotch with both hands and deposits her on the open chair next to him that she only sits on when he’s trying to sit in it, and goes to their fridge to get some ice. “What the heck happened?”

“What does it look like?” Ed says. “I kinda… there… was a fight.”

Al’s body freezes, which has nothing to do with the weather or the ice cubes in the towel in his hands. The streak of murder that usually smolders dormant in the core of his soul has turned instantly to lightning. “With _Roy_?”

Al will kill him. Al will tear him to pieces so small that the coroner won’t be able to identify them as _human_ , let alone as a particular person who had been dating—

“What?” Ed says. “No way.” The incandescence fades a little, and Al moves to take a breath. “Except—I mean, I guess it was… sort of his fault.”

Never mind. Murder it is.

“Not _directly_ ,” Ed says, waving both hands. “Al, calm down.” Al realizes that he has clenched his hands so tightly around the ice that some of the smaller cubes are cracking. “He didn’t do anything.”

Al watches very, very closely. Ed is a bad liar except when it really counts. “Okay.”

“I mean it,” Ed says. He’s working his way up to a high-quality scowl. “Just—that’s the thing. He didn’t do anything. That’s the _problem_.”

Al returns to the table and holds the towel full of ice cubes out to him. “Why? What’s going on?”

Ed takes the towel and obediently presses it to the purple and greenish bruises decorating his entire eye socket. “You—aren’t gonna want to hear it.”

Al plants his hand on the top of the kitchen table and leans in very, very slowly, looking Ed in the uncovered eye.

“Try me, Brother,” he says.

Ed makes a face at him, which is a bit of a shame. Al was hoping for some quaking, at least.

“You asked for it,” Ed says. “Just… okay. So—we were—hanging out at his mom’s place and having a drink, and… and he’s been… I mean, I can _tell_ he’s into me; he’s not—” As is often the case when Ed is talking, and especially when he’s talking about Roy, he employs an unnecessarily rude emphasizing adverb, which Al mentally elides from the sentence around it. “— _subtle_ about it, but… but I said we should hook up before he’s too old for it, and he went all closed-faced and put up that _wall_ like he does and said that we should ‘take it slow’. What the—” Al elides a few more choice words. “—is that supposed to mean? We’ve been on, like, fifty-seven dates, and we’ve _cooked_ together—how could he want it to be slower than that?” Ed attempts to fold his arms across his chest again without lowering the hand holding the ice to his eye, to mixed success. “So I figured that that must really mean that he wants to break up, because he never meant for it to get serious, and he’s just trying to let me down easy or some—” Al elides one more. “So I got mad and left and went and picked a fight with some guy outside a different bar who was catcalling the women going by.”

Al sighs for as long as he’s capable of, just to get the point across.

Then he reaches out and puts his hand on top of Ed’s head.

“Brother,” he says. “Have you considered the fact that Roy is a little… old-fashioned?”

Ed stares at him for a few seconds with the eye that is not behind a mound of ice cubes. “No, he’s not. I mean, he’s _old_ , but he’s not old-fashioned. He’s literally trying to dismantle the government, Al.”

Al wants to sigh again, but it would waste precious seconds that he could use beating his head against the brick wall that is Ed’s understanding of the universe. “People are complicated, Brother. Roy can be very politically progressive and still be a soppy romantic.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Ed says.

“Neither does the fact that you want to jump him,” Al says, partly just to watch the horror dawn slowly and coldly in Ed’s visible eye, “but you’re also worried about jumping him, because you think that he might change his mind about the relationship or suddenly find you insufficient or inexplicably decide that he’s gotten everything that he wanted out of it now.”

Ed continues to stare at Al blankly for long enough that the sighing impulse grows very powerful indeed.

“Okay,” Al says. He plants his hands flat on the tabletop. “Let me… okay. How about this? You said yourself that you have evidence that he wants you—because he _does_ want you. But because he knows that he does, he’s worried that he’s going to push you into something that _you_ don’t want, so he’s trying to be overly cautious. He thinks that courting you very slowly will prove to you that he _is_ serious, better than leaping into bed with you at the first opportunity would.”

“Shouldn’t,” Ed says, faintly.

“I agree,” Al says. “I’m actually willing to bet that he slept even less than you did; he’s probably very upset and confused about the fact that you—”

“No,” Ed says, still with only about a quarter of his voice. “The—leaping. Shouldn’t… leap into bed. You can break your legs that way. Don’t.”

“Unfortunately for my blood pressure,” Al says, leaning on the kitchen table a little harder, “we’re not talking about me, Brother. You need to apologize to him for walking out like that, and then you need to level with him.”

“He’s smart,” Ed says, shifting the ice. “He’ll figure it out.”

“ _No_ ,” Al says.

“Ouch,” Ed says. “Okay, he’s… relatively smart, but—”

Al holds both hands over his face and counts down from five. “Brother. He’s plenty smart. But smartness isn’t the issue. Communicating is the issue. You need to tell him what you’re feeling so that he can tell you what _he’s_ feeling so that you don’t freak out and stand him up again when you obviously both want the same thing and are just approaching it from different directions.”

Ed contemplates that for a few seconds, which at least… resembles progress. From a distance. If you squint.

“Do I have to get him flowers?” Ed says. “I’m opposed to flowers, financially, scientifically, and in moral principle.”

“Get him chocolates,” Al says, “so that you can eat most of them and then feed him a few while you’re lying on his couch trying to seduce him.”

Ed goes back to staring.

“Shut up, Brother,” Al says, stomping across the kitchen. “I’m getting you coffee.”

“Okay,” Ed says, meekly this time, and at least that _definitely_ looks like progress.

  


* * *

  


Every night and every morning, Al thanks his lucky stars—not that he really believes in luck, at least in the way that it’s culturally presented; _or_ really believes that suns burning millions of miles away to light up other universes have much of anything to do with the coincidences pertaining to his tiny little life—for the fact that he can sleep. He loves sleeping. Sleeping is wonderful and beautiful and cozy and restful and sweet. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. Like pizza.

The morning, two weeks later, that he sees a pair of large, shiny dress shoes tipped over next to the door, he thanks his lucky stars that he sleeps _soundly_.

Ed sleeps soundly, too, which is why the shuffling and rustling that Al hears while he pets Butterscotch and starts sipping at his coffee probably doesn’t rouse the world’s single greatest elder brother. Al gently relocates Butterscotch again and then goes to the cabinet to take two more mugs down. He fills them, sets them on the table, and brings over the sugar bowl and the carton of cream. Then he sits down again. Butterscotch rests her little chin on her little paws and flicks her tail back and forth.

Roy emerges from Ed’s bedroom with his shirt untucked—but mostly buttoned, which Al supposes he should be grateful for. Roy has pants on, too. And socks.

Most importantly, however, regardless of the particulars of his clothedness, he does not like he’s poised to dart out the door and attempt to escape, which means that he gets to live.

Roy closes Ed’s door very, very gently and then pads over to the kitchen and sits down in Ed’s chair.

“Oh,” Al says. “My goodness. Good morning, Roy. What a surprise.”

“Good morning,” Roy says. He’s trying not to wince. “I’m terribly sorry. I meant to get up earlier so that I could sneak out and bring back breakfast.” He pauses. “And some… apology pastries.”

Al rather doubts that they put specific danishes in the case with a little typed label card reading _Sorry I slept with your brother_ and/or _Sorry for the very awkward notes that you may receive from your neighbors this week_ , but he has to admit that he hasn’t checked.

“It’s all right,” he says. “I’m a very heavy sleeper.”

Roy’s eyes go a bit wide. “You…” He clears his throat. “…must… break records. Still, I…” He blinks down at the table. “Did you make coffee for me?”

“It would have been very rude not to,” Al says. “And in exchange, you’re going to listen to what I tell you.”

Roy goes still halfway to reaching across the table for the cream, so at least if they get through this part, Al can recruit him to be vice president of the Dairy Traitors Club.

Roy pulls his hand back. He bears a strong resemblance to a woodland creature that just spotted the gleam of the jaws of the trap, but he gamely says, “Of course.”

Al folds his hands on the table and leans forward. At least _someone_ in this relationship has the grace to look intimidated when he does that.

“You already know what will happen to you if you hurt him,” Al says. “But I get the sense that you don’t actually want to do that, even if there aren’t consequences that involve… things I won’t go into just now. I think that you really mean it, and I think that you really care, and I think that that’s probably pretty scary, after everything that you’ve already lost.”

Al understands what the closed-face putting-up-a-wall thing is now. “Alphonse—”

“ _Listen_ ,” Al says. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m on your side. You make him happy, even if he’s going to be really lousy at showing it a lot of the time, because he’s pretty scared, too. So you’re going to have to be careful, and you’re also going to have to be _obnoxiously_ upfront. You are going to have to spell things out. You are going to have to beat things through his thick little genius skull so hard that your hands will ache for hours afterwards. You are going to have to tell him in so many words that you don’t care about the metal or the scars, and that you don’t mind his weird habits or the way that his thoughts always jump the rails and just keep on rolling. You are going to have to tell him over and over, and you’re going to have to prove it over and over, because it is a fundamental fact in his mind that he does not _deserve_ to be happy, and a part of him will always be waiting for it to blow up in his face. It is going to be very difficult sometimes.” He pushes the sugar bowl forward a little bit. “But it’s going to be worth it.”

Roy smiles. This is much less brick wall and much more unqualified relief.

“Thank you,” he says. “That is… even better than the coffee. I wouldn’t say that lightly.”

There is a familiar _thump_ , shortly followed by Ed scrambling out into the hall and freezing there when he sees Roy sitting calmly at their kitchen table.

“Uh,” he says. At least he has pants on. Maybe Al should buy some little gold star stickers to give them both as positive reinforcement for times like this. “Hi.”

“Good morning,” Roy says. “Three sugars in your coffee?”

“I’m cutting back,” Ed says, slowly. “Two and a half.” Incrementally, he relaxes, although he still ends up cradling the automail arm to his chest as if downplaying it will somehow make any of them forget. He creeps into the kitchen, hesitating as Roy spoons sugar into one of the mugs, and then glances at Al.

Al attempts to look as mildly amused but nonjudgmental as humanly possible. It’s the least that he can do.

Evidently, it’s also enough: Ed sets his shoulders, and his eyes go sharp. He marches over to the table and frowns down at the third chair, which is currently occupied by the prettiest member of their family.

“Al,” Ed says. “Your fleabag misnomer stole my chair.”

“Oh, dear,” Al says without moving a muscle. “Whatever shall we do.”

Ed sits down on Roy’s lap. Roy goes pink. Ed picks up his coffee and slurps a bit.

“Thanks,” he says, apparently to both of them. “This is nice.”

Al sits back and wraps both hands around his mug, smiling just behind the rim.

“Isn’t it?” he says.


End file.
